Big Picture Features Poll

Feature
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Let’s try a new (but old) feedback flow. Instead of the usual complaint-driven development, let’s try the good old poll, from democracies of old. I’m not hoping for any kind of decision to be made here. Just trying to gauge interest.

What is your most-wanted, big picture feature for Discourse?

0 voters

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Should probably mention that “The Roadmap” is probably made up from the topics in the Releases category, you can’t really vote for “I think the roadmap is fine as is” without reading the roadmap.

Some of these have come up many times, but here is a little wish list from me…

  • Android Performance
  • I believe the road map covers this.
  • Since launching with Discourse in several communities I have been feeling the impact of this and know first hand that members have left the community because they feel the Discourse mobile client is “too slow” / unusable - “the old one worked and was fast”.
  • It’s the beast that never seems to go away - but the current release 1.3 hopefully helps fingers crossed.
  • Related topic: https://meta.discourse.org/t/why-is-discourse-so-slow-on-android/8823
  • Official Discourse "Chat"
  • I believe it’s important to keep conversations inside the communities to drive people to come back.
  • For one community I help with - currently users are being lost to Facebook Chat, then users move to Facebook groups because of better integration / notifications (real feedback from small community).
  • Important that the design doesn’t mean that topic posts go down. Perhaps tools to convert a chat conversation into a topic?
  • Related topic: https://meta.discourse.org/t/chat-plugin-features/24437
  • Related topic: https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-should-on-site-chat-look-like/24527
  • "First class" Android and iOS notifications
  • again driving users to return and allow for faster moving conversation within a community.
  • Full-page search
  • I believe the road map covers this.
  • Generally accessible more search options, users don’t understand they can type filters like order:latest even though the help is there.
  • For an older community (10+ years) pulling up older topics are not always more relevant - an easy option for a user to select. I’ve had reports of a user purchasing products based on forum recommendations in an older topic - not realising there was a newer topic just a few weeks earlier - as it didn’t appear within the first 5/6 search results but included the keywords.
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Me too, we definitely plan to work on a chat plugin, it is on the roadmap. We want the for many reasons.

  1. It will force us to fix all message_bus timing glitches (reliable messaging is rock solid, but timing can be off sometimes)

  2. It is a real strong need that every large community needs. A place is needed for TL3 to discuss stuff in person and straight away.

  3. A ton of people want this.

HTML bars helps, glimmer should help a bit more, its a constant battle but we are making progress.

I want this, but its tricky. Android seems to have all the apis to do this without an app, Apple has dropped the ball. I will talk to Laurent about this over the next few days and get a scope on the amount of work needed for something minimal. I think a “Discourse notifier” would probably be fairly simple.

Yes I hugely want it, we have /search but its not at all finished.

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Great stuff - just didn’t spot it in the releases category topics - so guessing it’s on the internal roadmap for you guys.

All I can say is “keep up the awesome work”!!

I know Discourse is a massive code base compared to other open source Ember apps. The fact that the Discourse team work so hard to ensure the code base keeps up with the sometimes quite dramatic code changes in Ember is immensely pleasing.

I would actually be pleased to see Android notifications happen first - just to say there is no reason to delay it if you see Android being reasonable to implement (and it fits in your development schedule obviously).

I understand a unified story for both Android and iOS considered - but I can see avoiding installing an app as a positive thing. You don’t need to worry about some communities wanting a custom branded version etc. However a community having a specific custom branded app to them would likely promote the community - but it’s a big bag of worms in terms of iOS app approval process.

Thanks for providing such direct feedback on all these “wishes”! :allthethings:

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